Georges Lentz is a paradoxical figure for his time and generation. Born in Luxembourg in 1965, but an Australian resident since 1990, Lentz’s music is widely performed in Australia, the EU and USA, yet he rarely accepts commissions and prefers to work, often for years at a time, on a small number of pieces; his musical language is highly idiosyncratic yet succeeds in communicating deeply-held convictions about the nature of the universe; his craftsmanship is of the highest level, but it is wholly at the service of the spiritual program which pervades his entire output. Almost all of Lentz’ work to date falls into works or groups of works entitled Caeli enarrant..., a reference to Psalm 19’s vision of the cosmos as the embodiment and proof of divine agency. As the composer has noted Caeli enarrant... is a cycle of pieces reflecting my fascination with astronomy as well as my spiritual beliefs, questions and doubts.’ We sense, then, an underpinning to Lentz’ work related to a certain stream of Christian mysticism – that which includes thinkers from Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen through to Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton.

Of course, Christian mysticism made something of a comeback in Western art music in the last decades of the twentieth century. The post-war avant-garde had sought freedom from the cultural weight of the past in the hermetic systems of Boulez, the political activism of Henze and Nono, the exploration of eastern religion by Cage and Stockhausen. A more recent generation including Arvo Pärt and John Tavener have married a radically simple harmonic palette to a program based on traditional Christian texts. Lentz, by contrast, is undogmatic about both his religious orientation and his musical modernism and has felt at liberty to use several radically different stylistic gambits to achieve his expressive purpose.

In the works of the early 1990s, his harmony ranges between strident density and radiant consonance; his rhythmic gestures can be aphoristic to the point of terseness, or generate considerable momentum; single pitches can have supreme centrality, or the processes of twentieth century serialism can be brought into play; melodies range from simple modal phrases, to fragmented lines distributed note by note among different voices, rather like the medieval practice of ‘hocket’. Lentz is also interested in aspects of Tibetan music, notably monastic chant and the sound of the gyaling, a double reed instrument which is almost always played in pairs, so that slight modifications of pitch (such as note ‘bending’), and ornamentation (trills) create an immense variety of expression. Lentz often works on several pieces concurrently and over a long span of time.

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